The Spinning Wheel and Irish Poem

 
Mellow the moonlight to shine is beginning,
Close by the window young Eileen is spinning ;
Bent o'er the fire her blind grandmother, sitting,
Is crooning, and moaning, and drowsily knitting :— '
Eileen, achora, I hear some one tapping.' ' '
Tis the ivy, dear mother, against the glass flapping.' '
Eily, I surely hear somebody sighing.' "
Tis the sound, mother dear, of the summer wind dying.'
Merrily, cheerily, noiselessly whirring,
Swings the wheel, spins the wheel, while the foot's stirring ;
Sprightly, and brightly, and airily ringing
Thrills the sweet voice of the young maiden singing. '
What's that noise that I hear at the window, I wonder?' ' '
Tis the little birds chirping the holly-bush under.' •
What makes you be shoving and moving your stool on,
And singing, all wrong, that old song of "The Coolun " ?'
There's a form at the casement—the form of her true love—
And he whispers, with face bent, ' I'm waiting for you, love ;
Get up on the stool, through the lattice step lightly,
We'll rove in the grove while the moon's shining brightly
Merrily, cheerily, noiselessly whirring, &c.

-JOHN FRANCIS WALLER

BORN in Limerick in 1809, and graduated LL.D. at Trinity
College, Dublin, in 1852.